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A Wee Keynote

September 26, 2008 ·

I said I'd blog more about Adam Lehman's keynote at A Wee Dram so here it is...
Adam talked about the success of CF8 and the huge uptick in the number of developers since 2007 (I forgot to write down the name of the research company that provided that data but it was a third party, not Adobe). He said that the increase in interest and use of ColdFusion has meant that the lack of (good) developers was one of the primary problems that companies face. Claude Englebert, Adobe's EMEA CF specialist, confirmed that after meeting with companies all over Europe, CF is very strong but the problem is finding (good) developers.
Adam talked a bit about the various advisory committees (both internal and the public CFML group that I chair) and the free-for-educational-use availability of CF8 from https://freeriatools.adobe.com/coldfusion/.
Next Adam ran through the proposed features for Centaur, including a few new things. He covered the language enhancements around cfscript and CFCs as well as touching on the Hibernate integration.
Then he said that Adobe is considering how to expose all of the "services" inside CF as SOAP and AMF remote services. The idea is that it would allow clients to access the engines that drive CF's query, mail, document (PDF), imaging, charting, Exchange services etc. They are considering making AS3 libraries available that would allow Flex developers to easily call any of these services directly, making CF the back end of choice because of the rich functionality it adds to Flex. An interesting approach. He also said they are considering integrating BlazeDS more deeply into CF, not like the current optional LCDS Express install, but as a core part of CF which would open up the possibility of direct message handling via CFCs as well as potential improvements to AMF performance (since it would be tightly integrated with CF).
As always, he encouraged folks to attend MAX to get a lot more information about Centaur (and hinted that MAX Europe would get more impressive demos than MAX North America due to the extra two weeks the team have to work on things).
Updated to correct URL for ColdFusion for education - thanx to Yancy Wharton for pointing that out!

4 responses

The ColdFusion evangelism PDF cites the Evans Data Corporation (EDC) 2007 Developer Population survey as the source for the number of CF developers worldwide, so maybe that was the research company behind the uptick number?

Thanks for the info about Wee Dram. Interesting that things may be going to have more APIs into the core of the server. I can't think of right now what I'd do with that off hand, but it opens some possibilities.

FYI: I get a sever not found message for the Free RIA Tools link. Is it not up at the moment, or is the link incorrect?

This is so exciting. Actionscript, MXML, and ColdFusion combined represent the future potential and capacity of the internet.

It's so exciting to watch the gap between AJAX-based application potential and Adobe technology-based RIA applications widen and widen. I totally support the AS3 initiative, and am so proud of Adobe for recognizing the untapped potential there and the unanimous benefit it brings to all technologies involved.